Saturday, January 15, 2011

The Tasks feature in Outlook is a great way to keep track of what you need to get done, but it’s also a good way to help collaborate with others and assign tasks to them. Here’s how to assign tasks to other people easily.

Note: the ability to assign tasks to others has been around for a while, so you can use it in previous versions out Outlook as well, it’s just in a slightly different place.

How to Assign a Task to Someone

There are a couple of ways you can assign tasks, including while you’re creating a new task—all you need to do is click on “Assign Task” on the Ribbon.

Or while you’re looking at the Tasks pane in Outlook, you can right-click on it and select Assign Task from the menu. This should work from any of the Tasks views.

Now you just need to enter the email address of the person who you’re assigning the task to.

Then the person you assigned the task to can add it to their list and send updates on it.

If you’re new to Outlook and the Tasks feature, this should get you started, and don’t forget to delegate your tasks!

Are you always nervous that you’ll accidentally download a malicious file or program? Here’s how you can scan files for viruses before downloading them to your computer.

Whether you’re a geek or a standard computer user, chances are you often download new programs and apps for your computer. There’s tons of great stuff out there, but there’s also tons of stuff that can steal your information, mess up your Windows install, and worse. We’ve written before about how to upload files from your computer and check them on VirusTotal, but it’s much better to simply scan files before your download them. There’s a couple ways you can do this, so keep reading to see what will work best for you.

Scan Links For Viruses on VirusTotal

VirusTotal is an online service that scans files for viruses with over 40 different security tools. Since there have been security concerns with a wide variety of files that are normally safe, such as PowerPoints and PDF files, we’d recommend you scan any file you’re downloading, especially if it’s from an unknown source. To do this, just right-click on the file’s link, and select Copy link address.

Now, browse to VirusTotal.com, select the Submit a URL tab, then paste the link in the text field and click Submit URL.

VirusTotal will quickly check the link against several URL analysis tools to see if the site is listed as a malicious site already. If it appears clean, your file’s more likely to be safe, but you still should check. To do this, click the View downloaded file analysis link near the top.

After a few moments, you’ll see the results of your file’s virus scan. If it shows that nothing was detected, then you can feel fairly safe that the file is fine to download and use. It is possible for a new malicious file to slip by all of the scanners, but very unlikely.

If one of the scanners does detect malicious content, it’ll list what it detected. Do note that sometimes a scanner will wrongly think a file contains a virus when it’s in fact clean, so if the majority of the scanners report that the file’s ok, you may still be fine to use it.

Also, VirusTotal may inform you that the link or file has already been scanned. You can choose to view the last report, or you could choose to reanalyze the link to be certain nothing’s changed.

You can use this same trick to check any website for malicious content, even if it doesn’t contain a download. If you’re emailed a link or come across a search result you’re unsure about, feel free to copy the URL and scan it with VirusTotal as before to see if the site contains malicious content.

Integrate VirusTotal Into Firefox

If you’re a Firefox user, you can check links and sites for malicious content without opening the VirusTotal site with the VTZilla plugin. Install the extension from their site (link below); Firefox may block the install by default, so click Allow then install as normal.

If you’re using Firefox 4 beta, it may inform you that the extension is not compatible with your version of Firefox. Follow the instructions at this article to bypass the error, and then install as before.

Now you’ll have a new VirusTotal toolbar in Firefox. You can enter a site address or file hash in the search box to check it on VirusTotal, or click Scan current site to make sure the site you’re on doesn’t have anything malicious on it (that said, it’s better to check the site before you visit it). If you’re not a fan of browser toolbar, simply right-click on the bar and un-check the VirusTotal Toolbar to remove it.

The best feature is the link scanner in the right-click menu. When you’re on a site with a download link, simply right-click the link and select Scan with VirusTotal.

VirusTotal will open in a new tab and check the download URL to see if it’s listed as a bad domain on Google, Mozilla, and more, just like it would with a website. It’ll also open a popup with an analysis of the file itself; if you don’t see it, you’ll need to allow the popup from VirusTotal.

Now you’re able to find out if a download is safe in just a click or two. There’s no reason to worry if your downloads are safe anymore!

While VirusTotal can help keep you from downloading virus-laden files, it’s still not enough protection on it’s own. You should still keep your software updated and use an antivirus solution. We recommend using Microsoft Security Essentials; it’s free, lightweight, and works great. But no matter what you use, it’s still great to know that the files you download are safe to use, and this is where Virus Total comes in. Make it a part of your normal routine; we do, and it keeps us from installing junk all the time.

Web2PDF is an extremely useful web based service that lets you browse the web using your email address.

Compose a new email message, type the URL of any web page in the body of that message and send it to submit@web2pdfconvert.com. The service will then fetch the corresponding web page on its own servers and will send it back it you as a PDF attachment – all this takes no more than a few seconds.

I have tried this service will several web pages, including ones that have complex layouts, and the conversion was more or less perfect in all cases (see examples here and here). The converted PDFs not only retain the layout but also the hyperlinks and thus you may fetch other internal pages as well using email itself.

Such a service may come handy in quite a few situations like when you have access to email but general web access is restricted. Or when you are surfing the web on an old mobile phone with a pathetic browser – in that case, the built-in PDF reader may be a better option for reading web articles.

Your contacts are often scattered across multiple email accounts and social sites.

For instance, you may have switched to Gmail but some of your contacts may still be stored in the old address books of Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail. Then there are places like Facebook and LinkedIn that store personal and professional details of your contacts (including profile pictures) but fetching this information into your main address book is often a tricky thing.

One Place for all your Contacts

If you find it a hassle to maintain multiple address books, a possible solution is that you consolidate them all into a single cloud-based service like Google Contacts.

Here are some ideas on how you may go about doing this:

Step 1: Bring all address books into Google Contacts

Go to Gmail Settings and click the “Import Mail and Contacts” button to bring all the existing contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, Google Apps, and your other email accounts into Google Contacts.

Next download your address books from LinkedIn, Facebook, Outlook, Orkut, and other accounts as CSV files and import them all into Google Contacts one-by-one.

Step 2: Clean-up the duplicates

When you import contacts from multiple places, it is obvious that some of the entries would be duplicates of each other. Google Contacts however makes it quite easy for you to manage these duplicates.

Choose “Find Duplicates” under “My Contacts” and the tool will group all the entries that share the same name. Do remember to review all the default suggestions one-by-one as sometimes two people in your contact list can have similar names and you don’t want to combine them into one.

Once you’re ready, just hit the Merge button.

Google Contacts Manager mostly relies on the person’s name to detect duplicate entries. If it fails to recognize all your duplicate contacts, you can merge them manually as shown in the next screenshot.

Step 3: Enrich your contacts data

Google Contacts now has basic details of all your contacts including their names, email addresses and, in some cases, phone numbers and birthdays. We are however still missing profile pictures, website URLs, social profiles, etc.

There’s a useful online service called Gist that may help bring lot of such additional profile details into our Google Contacts. Here’s how:

3b. Once your account is activated, go to “Other Contacts” and connect Google Contacts with Gist. Type your Gmail username and click “Authorize and Upload” – this uses OAuth so you can upload your entire Google address book into Gist without sharing your credentials.

The process of importing contacts from Google into Gist may take a while to complete depending on how you large your address book is. Take a coffee break here!

3c. Now that all your contacts have been imported (see the progress bar at the top), go to gist.com/people and you’ll find that Gist has discovered tons of extra information about your contacts that weren’t available in your original address book. This includes their blog addresses, social URLs and more.

Let’s now bring this new information back into Google Contacts. Select all the contacts, click Export and Gist will send you a single vCard file in your Inbox.

Download this v-Card file and import it into your Google Contacts. Don’t worry, it will only merge the new details and won’t create any duplicate contacts.

The next thing that we are missing in Google Contacts are profile pictures. There’s a utility called Google Contacts Sync that takes your Gmail (or Google Apps) credentials, finds the matching entries in your Facebook network and accordingly updates their profile pictures and birthdays in Google Contact.

If you are not connected with all your Google contacts on Facebook, you can still bring their profile pictures through RainMaker. This is an excellent service that can populate your Google Contacts entries with photos and social details pulled from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The free account will however limit you to 25 contacts.

To summarize, we first imported all our address books into Google Contacts, merged the duplicates and then added profile pictures and social details of our contacts.

What next? If you have a smartphone like the iPhone, Nokia (Symbian), BlackBerry or Windows Mobile, you can use Google Mobile Sync to keep your Google Contacts synchronized with the built-in address book application. Android mobile phones have this built-in so your phone’s address book will always be in sync with Google Contacts.

Microsoft Office users may try GContactSync to keep their Outlook address book in sync with Google Contacts (it works both ways). Another alternative is Cyncz – it will first pull all your Google Contacts into the cloud and them synchronizes them with Outlook on the desktop through a plug-in. See the other synchronization tools for Outlook.

We have covered several programs and online services that allow a user to print an image on multiple sheets of paper. Among them are the online services Rasterbator and Block Posters, as well as the desktop application Poster Printer for the Windows operating system. Why would someone want to do that? Reasons to print images on multiple pages are to print the image in its native resolution and to create a larger printout of the image, for instance to use it as a poster.

The main thing that the photo printing software Image Print Wizard adds to the table is that it does not take longer than 20 seconds to print an image on multiple pages. The program separates the process into three steps. The image that needs to be printed on multiple pages is selected in the first step. This simply opens a file browser to pick the image from the local system.

The printout options are setup in the second step. Here it is possible to define the print mode and scale. Available print modes are printing based on the image size or to fit or stretch the image to page.

Image Size: Image is printed with exact size calculated using image size, image resolution and current printer resolution. Scale is used for changing target image size.

Fit to page: Image is centered on the page with maximal possible size without distortion. Scale is used for changing target image size. With the scale set to more than 100% image will be cropped by page margins.

Stretch to page: Image is stretched to the entire page with potential distortions of proportions. Scale parameter is not used

The pages the image will be printed on are selected on the third and final setup page. It is possible to select a page count between 1 and 10 or create a custom page count for the printout.

A click on the print button sends the selection to the printer to print the image on multiple pages.

Image Print Wizard is a free application for the Windows operating system. It is available for download at the developer website.

Computer users have numerous reasons for finding and deleting duplicate files on their systems. Some of the top reasons include freeing up storage space and better manageability of files in the operating system. The duplicate file finder Duplicate Cleaner 2 has just been released as a beta preview.

Duplicate Cleaner is a sophisticate duplicate file finder with lots of options to configure the scanning and duplicate file checking. The main program window is used to configure the search criteria. Duplicate Cleaner can be configured to find files based on the following parameters:

Same content (checked by comparing MD5 hashes)

Same file name

Same size

Same created date

Same modified date

For music files: same artist, same title, same album

Filters can be added to reduce the number of files to be scanned by the program. It is possible to configure a file size filter, which will only scan files of a specific size range, file dates, which will only scan files that have been created or modified between dates specified and file name filters that can be used to include or exclude files based on names and extensions. All file scanning parameters can be combined in the scan.

Folders, partitions and drives can be added easily in the same window. Only the selected folders will be scanned by the duplicate file finder.

The time it takes to scan the folder depends on the speed of the hard drive and computer, as well as the files and folders and how much disk space they occupy on the selected drives. A report is displayed at the end of the scan listing the number of files that have been scanned, the time it took to scan the files and the number and size of the duplicate files that have been found.

A listing of all duplicate files is then displayed to the user. Individual files can be selected manually, and a preview is available for images for a visual aid.

The Selection Assistant can aid the user if many duplicate files have been found on the system.

Here it is possible to select multiple files at once, based on lots of different criteria including:

By text patterns in file name, path, sitze and lots of other variables. Supports regular expressions

By location based on a selected path

Once the duplicate files have been selected for removal it is possible to configure deletion options. Standard options exist like deleting the duplicates to the recycle bin / without moving them to the recycle bin. Interesting options are available to automatically rename the duplicate files, move or copy them instead or create hardlinks (only on NTFS file systems). The option to create hardlinks could be interesting for users who fear that the removal of files could result in dead links or accessibility problems.

It is additionally possible to remove empty folders in the process. Duplicate Cleaner is an impressive program that comes with lots of additional options that have not been mentioned yet. It is for instance possible to change the file comparison algorithm, include network drives in the search and to import and export the results to CSV files.

Here is the feature list of Duplicate Cleaner as listed on the developer website:

Duplicate Cleaner Download And Compatibility

It is surprising that this high quality application is available free of charge. It is one of the best duplicate cleaners available for the Windows operating system. The duplicate file finder is compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. It should also run fine on Windows Server installations. Downloads and additional information are available at the developer website at DigitalVolcano.co.uk.